The 75th annual South Central Modern Language Association convention will be held in San Antonio, Texas from October 11-14 at the historic Menger Hotel on the River Walk, right next door to the Alamo. San Antonio is the perfect city for this year’s theme, “Crossroads of Cultures.” Through the art, architecture and design of the city, it is evident that there were, and are, different cultures crossing paths and influencing each other, now and over the past several centuries. San Antonio is a cultural kaleidoscope that began with the native indigenous peoples who made their home here. The arrival of the Spanish people and, later, the Anglos, resulted in a new culture that permeates almost every place in the United States: the Hispanic American culture.

In disability studies, the environment is already an issue as the social model situates the impaired, and possibly disabled, body in the world. After all, it is the social environment that disables. To state the obvious, this emphasis on the environment substantiates, to a degree, the major concern of ecocritics. However, there are also problems. As Tom Shakespeare points out, the social model is limited: Not every environment, human or not, can be made fully accessible. Can, truly, a mountainous terrain be made accessible to everyone?

The seventh Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies summer school will be hosted by the Flemish Memory Studies Network (a collaboration of the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative at Ghent University and KU Leuven’s Literary Studies Research Unit) from 22 to 24 August 2018 at the Irish College in Leuven. Confirmed keynote speakers are Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths, University of London), Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow), and Gabriele Schwab (UC Irvine).

2018 sees a flourishing crop of events commemorating, one way or another, the bicentenary of Frankenstein’s publication. The Fates of Frankenstein is a two-day conference about adaptations and appropriations of Shelley’s novel.

My own current involvement in this project stems from substantial fieldwork on the topic, in particular fraudulent academic conferences that offer various amenities such as vacation/tourist packages; guaranteed acceptance for participation; guaranteed publications in conference proceedings; invitations for future keynote speaking engagements; all at the expense of allocated college/university research budgets.